Smith: What makes creativity happen

Published 8:30 pm, Saturday, November 24, 2012

If you're looking for creative genius, it may be hard to spot. You might not have identified it, in fact, in the rather unprepossessing fellow in a wool sweater sitting next to me one day last week.

And there's a geographic bias to brilliance, I hear, so people who live in a place like Albany, where the creative class is a veiled minority, can't be expected to create work on the cutting edge of culture in the way that someone from, say, San Francisco or Manhattan could, surrounded as they are by creative people. Nah. This place is no cultural capital.

Please take a moment, then, to meet Gregory Maguire, a son of Albany's Pine Hills neighborhood, who was back last week at his alma mater, the University at Albany. You know UAlbany; it's ranked way up at No. 329 on the Forbes.com list of America's Best Colleges. What distinction can come from such a place? (It's no Berkeley, if you get my drift.)

As I was saying, meet Gregory Maguire, the man in the sweater, back in town by nice coincidence during the run at Proctors of "Wicked," the Tony Award-winning musical based on his brilliant 1995 best-selling novel. He was here to donate his professional papers to the university library, and during the time we were together I kept thinking of how his classmates might look at him now. Would they be thinking that they always knew he would someday write a book with more than 5 million copies in print, along with seven other novels and countless short stories and children's books? Are they wondering how such creativity happened to strike such an unassuming fellow? I mean, what happened to set this guy apart?

It wasn't luck, although being in the right place at the right time matters in life. Louis Pasteur, pioneer of the germ theory, observed that "chance favors only the prepared mind."

Yes, a falling apple gave Isaac Newton a perfect example of gravitational pull, but it was in a fertile and educated mind that the seed of that thought was planted.

Maguire will tell you that his work arises from a home filled with words, in a family in which five of the seven children became writers. His dad was a Times Union reporter and columnist; his mom wrote poetry and pushed her children to read and to write.

Comforting as it is to a newspaper guy to witness success among the progeny of our lot, we all have seen plenty of parents whose best efforts to encourage certain behavior in their offspring haven't turned out as well.

There are various theories about how creative success happens. Before his career was mortally wounded a few months ago by some fabricated quotes, Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist turned writer, was touting a book exploring creativity. He contended that creativity corresponds to a steady rhythm of alpha waves in the brain's right hemisphere, which are stimulated not by hard work but — here's good news — by relaxation.

You think your best ideas come in the shower, or when you're on your bike or hiking in the woods? You're probably right.

The comedic genius John Cleese said as much in a 2009 interview. "If you're racing around all day, ticking things off a list, looking at your watch, making phone calls and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas," Cleese said.

So, folks, relax. But — wait.

Those moments of creative clarity, researchers say, must come after the preparation that Pasteur referred to. Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor who writes widely on how change occurs, notes that innovation is rarely successful in a first attempt. The frustration that precedes the illumination, he says, turns out to be an essential part of the creative process.

So Gregory Maguire, raised in what one brother called "a wordy, nerdy family," read widely, studied hard, and undertook so many independent study courses that the university registrar initially tried to block him from receiving his degree. There was no apple falling from a tree to reveal that brilliant notion of a misunderstood green witch retelling the story of The Land of Oz.

Against that backdrop, Maguire's explanation this week of the process of creating his work sounded deceptively simple. "All art," he told a gathering at UAlbany, "involves dipping the scupper into the deepest well you can find, and seeing what comes up."

So we dig the well, which is the hard work, and then draw up the creative refreshment. Worth weighing, I'd say, as we confront the bustling holiday season, and the challenge it can present to our creativity.